WSJ

How It Feels To Be Falsely Accused

My high-profile clients know the painful personal costs of defamation.

By Libby Locke

Oct. 4, 2018 7:33 p.m. ET

As an attorney, I represent people at the pinnacle of their careers facing front-page reputational attacks. I spend countless hours, day and night, counseling and consoling high-profile clients—from CEOs to celebrities—experiencing acute trauma. Those falsely accused of misconduct—professional or personal, sexual or criminal—face a hellish choice: Let it go and allow the lie to persist as a permanent blot, or fight back through the legal process to clear their name. As we talk through the decision, my clients grapple with the damage to their relationships, lives and reputations.

They lament the unfairness of having their reputations destroyed—legacies built from work, faith, relationships and day-to-day treatment of others over a lifetime. They slowly realize there is no easy fix, in part because First Amendment precedents place an enormous burden of proof on defamation plaintiffs. Most poignantly, they grieve over the damage to their families.

They worry about who has seen the defamation. The parents of their children’s classmates? The neighbors? The cashier who sees their name on a credit card? They stress out wondering if they’ll ever be able to go to a social gathering without encountering someone who thinks it’s true. They get angry. They cry. For most, it is their darkest hour.

That is why I was not at all surprised by Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s emotional response last week, shifting from moral indignation at the absurd and vicious political theater to sorrow at the impact of the accusation on his family. Like my clients, Judge Kavanaugh is facing the gut-wrenching trauma of this high-profile—indeed, the most high-profile—reputational attack.

He also faces a Catch-22 as a judicial nominee. His detractors in the media have decreed that the only way to demonstrate innocence is with an “authentic” emotional response, yet that response is taken as evidence of lack of an appropriate “judicial temperament”—as if a Justice Kavanaugh would be hearing his own case. Never mind his hundreds of opinions, the universal praise by litigants who have appeared before him, and the scores of women and men who’ve worked for and effusively praise him.

Contrast this with the deference afforded to his accusers. The accusations were timed suspiciously, brought forth by Senate Democrats and activist lawyers who lay in wait for six weeks, then leaked to the media just in time to derail a vote. Nonetheless, throngs of people announced that they believed the accusations despite the contradictions, memory lapses and lack of contemporaneous corroboration.

The public destruction of a respected jurist by a decades-old uncorroborated allegation has thoroughly refuted the idea that those accused of sexual assault have an unfair advantage over their accusers. No wonder Judge Kavanaugh is angry. Any man falsely accused of sexual assault would be. And any respectable jurist would have been frustrated to have his personal reputation and his family’s well-being destroyed—along with bedrock principles of American jurisprudence like due process, evidentiary burdens and the presumption of innocence.

Ms. Locke is a partner in the law firm Clare Locke LLP, based in Alexandria, Va.

Appeared in the WSJ October 5, 2018,